The attack on Hroza, a village near the front in eastern Ukraine, took place at noon on Thursday, according to local authorities. A Russian robot is said to have crashed into a grocery store in the village. In the cafe that the grocery store housed, there was a large group of people gathered to attend a funeral ceremony.
Ukrainian Valeria Herasymenko was at the time in nearby Shevchenkove, just over three kilometers from Hroza.
– We were in the center and heard an explosion. Then someone told me that something had happened in Hroza. We knew then that my mother was here, says Valeria when the news agency Reuters meets her at the racial masses.
The search for survivors has ended
At eight o’clock in the evening, Swedish time, Ukrainian rescue services announced that they had ended the search for both survivors and those killed in the rubble that remains of the business.
“A total of 51 people were killed (including a child born in 2017). 6 people were injured,” the rescue service wrote in a summary on Telegram.
The figure makes the attack one of the bloodiest since the Russian invasion last year, in terms of civilian casualties. In Britain’s The Guardian review of past attacks, it is surpassed only by the Mariupol theater bombing in March 2022.
“Not a big village”
Three of the 51 victims belonged to Oleksandr Mukhovatyi’s family. When Reuters meets him, he is wandering among the dead bodies. Many of the faces are familiar to him.
– This is not a big village. Maybe 300-350 people, but many left during the Russian occupation, he says.
Hear from Oleksandr about the attack that killed three of his family members in the clip above.